Back
in March, I reviewed a short parody story by Jon
L. Breen, entitled "The
Problem of the Vanishing Town" (1979), which satirized one of
Edward
D. Hoch's most popular and unforgettable series-characters, Dr.
Sam Hawthorne – a country physician who's a magnet for seemingly
impossible crimes. Breen littered his parody with passing references
to unrecorded locked room problems that have taken place in the small
New England town of Northsouth.
One
of these references was to the inexplicable murder of a circus clown,
who was mauled to death by "a
lion on the fifth floor of the Northsouth Hotel,"
but "the
lion was in his cage five blocks away."
The idea behind these references was to describe a situation so
utterly impossible that "no
one could possibly solve it rationally."
Twenty years later, Hoch found a solution to the problem and worked
it into a short story.
"Circus
in the Sky" was originally published in the anthology Scenes
of Crimes
(2000) and reprinted in the June, 2001, issue of Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine.
The
story is narrated by a computer programmer in his mid-twenties, whose
name we never learn, working for a month in an unfamiliar city far
from his home office and decides to kill a boring evening by going to
circus – which no longer played "in
big tops set up along the railroad tracks in cities like Omaha and
Des Moines."
A big circus were now arena events competing rock stars, ice shows
and professional wrestling for the best dates.
After
the show ended, the narrator goes to a late-night restaurant to have
a drink and strikes up a conversation with the female lion tamer the
Breen Brothers Circus, Mimi Gothery, whose stage-name is "Carpathia."
They're interrupted by two policemen who request they accompany them
to the seventeenth floor of the office building across the street.
The body of a lawyer, Richard Strong, had been found in his high-rise
office with his face and suit "shredded
by bloody claw marks"
as if "a
lion had appeared from nowhere,"
lashed out violently, "and
then vanished."
Richard
Strong was "one
of the business acting as clowns"
at that night's performance, which is done for charitable or
promotional reasons, but, during the lion tamer's act, he attempted
to push some flowers on Carpathia. And he was brushed aside. However,
the narrator is her alibi and the physical evidence is on her side,
but it makes the murder look even more impossible than it already
did.
The
police matched the claw marks on the body with the paw of one of
Carpathia's lions, Gus, but nobody believes she walked around that
night with "a
lion on a leash"
and there are two witnesses, circus owner and a stable boy, who swear
Gus was in his locked cage after his performance – either one or
the other was around the lion's cage the entire night. So nobody
could have taken him out of the cage to commit a murder in a very
dangerous and roundabout way.
Breen
has admitted he has no earthly idea how to explain the miracle
problem he had posed in "The Problem of the Vanishing Town," but
Hoch explained the conundrum of the invisible lion with a devilish
ease with all clues you need to figure it out yourself (I did!). More
importantly, the simple, down-to-earth explanation didn't fell flat
coming on the tail-end of such a fantastical premise. You can almost
describe "Circus in the Sky" as a Clayton
Rawson impossible crime story ("Claws
of Satan," 1940) as perceived by John
Dickson Carr (The
Unicorn Murders,
1935). And the fact that the central puzzle started out as a
throw-away joke in a parody of Hoch added another layer to the
overall story.
So,
all in all, Hoch's "Circus in the Sky" is another one of those
impossible crime stories baffling absent from any of the locked
room-themed anthologies published during the last two decades, but
anthologists should keep it in mind for potential future anthologies.
This short story is vintage Hoch and shows why he was the
flesh-and-blood incarnation of the American detective story (after
Ellery
Queen, of course). Highly recommended!
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